1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to improved algorithms for recovering missing data in a digital signal, and more specifically for predicting lost regions of data in the signal using information surrounding these regions. The algorithms are primarily directed to recovering an image/video-frame by predicting lost regions of pixels in the image/video-frame using spatial information surrounding these regions. The techniques of the algorithms may be embodied in software, hardware or combination thereof and may be implemented on a computer or other processor-controlled device.
2. Description of the Related Art
In many image and video compression applications the decoder frequently has to contend with channel corrupted data and therefore has to resort to image recovery and error concealment algorithms. Throughout the years, many techniques have been proposed that enable decoders to avoid the severe consequences of channel errors. In the case of images, the lost or erroneous data has to be predicted spatially, while for video both temporal and spatial prediction can be attempted. However, previous techniques suffer from various problems, including too many prediction errors, too application, procedure or data coordinate specific operation, able to handle only certain regions of specific size, shape and/or type of data, limited robustness and/or adaptability, and requiring special information such as motion vectors for video frames.
Above-identified application Ser. No. 10/229,667 (the related application) provides algorithms that can recover an image/video-frame by predicting lost regions of pixels in the image/video-frame using spatial information surrounding these regions. The algorithms predict the lost regions of pixels using denoising with thresholding, preferably iterative denoising with hard thresholding. This invention provides improved data recovery algorithms.